Technology and me in 2025

Posted on November 24, 2025 by dgm

Most years I do a post recording how my personal use of technology over the year.

Looking back at last year’s post, I can see there’s been a few changes but perhaps not as many as you might expect.

The major event affecting my use of technology was not the end of Windows 10, but my finally coming to the end of my documentation projects for the National Trust. My guerilla cataloguing exercise for the Athenaeum doesn’t require so much in the way of equipment – a laptop, a camera, and a scratchpad seems to cover it, along with the beanbags and some of bits a pieces out of my work kit.

Almost, I have occasionally documented artefacts up at the Athenaeum, most recently some nineteenth century tools leant to us as part of an exhibition, and when doing so I’ve reused the tweaked methodology I used down at Lake View.

I’m still using my old Windows 10 Thinkpad for the cataloguing exercise – after all, all I need is a browser but I’m mindful of the fact that technology creep may break things I’ve already configured a refurbished Windows 11 Acer Travelmate ready to use as a substitute cataloguing machine.

The only reason I havn’t changed over is that I like the slightly larger screen on the Thinkpad, but I should probably bite the bullet and change.

Talking of larger screens I had a win, successfully installing Ubuntu on J’s old iMac which has given me a big screen device for looking at images, which, coupled with the recycled workbench I put together mid year, has made the whole business of transcriptions and the like much easier than before.

And while I’m talking about installing linux on things, I successfully installed linux on an old Chromebook I’d picked up cheaply with the intention of using it as a distraction free writing machine.

My initial purchase of the Chromebook wasn’t one of my better decisions, I managed to pick a model that was too far out of updates to be truly useful, so nothing ventured, nothing gained I had a go at installing linux on it and have ended up with a robust little writing machine that’s proved incredibly useful with its excellent battery life.

The original distraction free machine continues to live on as a second documentation machine – it’s battery life isn’t quite as good as the Chromebook, but having rather more in the way of storage adding extra software when required is not a problem, unlike the Chromebook which is pretty tight for free space.

At the same time I installed linux on my old AMD Ryzen based laptop – I’d originally planned on using Bunsen Labs Linux on it, but the screen had an annoying flicker. Changing to Ubuntu was better but not perfect, but after some digging I located some Lenovo drivers for Ubuntu and that fixed the problem.

The machine now sits happily on my recycled workbench.

Somehow, I seem to have ended up with rather more linux machines than is totally sane, and it’s probably time for a cull, especially given that I’ll doubtless be moving my remaining Windows 10 machines to linux sometime in 2026.

On the other hand they all have their uses, as I found when I discovered that the old laptop I’d put in the studio before we turned into a shared workspace still had a working CD drive allowing me to recover data from an old CD for J.

As for the rest, I’m still using the Lenovo Ideapad I bought back in 2022, principally as a machine to take away with me on an overnight trip. Battery life is still good, and the ability to use it in tablet mode saves having to take an extra device with me. The only problem is the lack of ports, and if there’s going to be any photography involved I either take the HP laptop I bought for our 2024 Tasmania trip or a linux based laptop.

Much to my regret, I have ditched my old pandemic era Huawei tablet – even though the hardware was still reliable it was too far out of software updates to support the current versions of the applications I use.

I still have a soft spot for Android tablets though and replaced it with one from Honor that works well and does the job

At the same time I ditched the dogfood tablet. Basically after nearly five years of use it was too old, too slow, but had done its job and done it well. At the time being I’m using the little Lenovo M8 I bought last year as an e-reader among other things and that’s working out well.

So, as regards hardware it’s been a year of incremental change, as I expect next year will be, with more linux and fewer machines (possibly).

I did make some changes to my use of social media despite having sworn off it a couple of years ago.

I rejoined Facebook because a lot of local history societies use it as a means for communication, and there was material out there I wanted to take a look at. In the month or so I’ve been back on Facebook it’s been useful, even though I’m still mostly lurking.

At the same time I joined pixelfed as a way of sharing photos that wasn’t Instagram, and that’s also working out well.

So there we have it. No dramatic changes, a few successes, and perhaps a bit more linux than last year …

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The disappearance of the long s from handwriting

Posted on November 12, 2025 by dgm

The long s (ſ) and its disappearance from handwriting is a bit of a mystery to me.

Printers had more or less abandoned its use at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although it continued to continued to be used in the Sydney Gazette as late as 1814.

However, by 1816 it was gone, and the typography followed modern usage.

Handwriting was a different matter though.

When my great^n grandfather was born in 1814, the parish clerk recording the event used a long s. Jane Austen also used a long s on occasions in her writing, so we could plausibly argue that when people wrote letters and official documents, they used the long s.

It would be entirely natural to find that people who had learned to write using the long s would continue to do out of habit long after printers had dropped its use, especially if they were frequent correspondents.

So when did the handwritten long s drop out of use?

Short answer is I don’t know. I’d say probably around 1830, and certainly there’s some evidence to support the idea that it was much less commonly used by then.

Fanny Owen, when she wrote to Charles Darwin in 1831 before his departure on the Beagle, appears not to have used it, nor did Florence Nightingale or Madeleine Smith.

Fanny Owen is the most interesting example – Florence Nightingale and Madeleine Smith were born in 1820 and 1835 respectively, which would have meant that by the time they were learning to write, the long s had dropped out of use in printed books, but Fanny Mostyn Owen was born in 1806, which suggests that she would have learned to write in the early 1810’s, at a time when the long s was still in use, but may no longer have been taught in books of penmanship.

And this leads me to an interesting little puzzle – I was looking at a Facebook page from the East Yorkshire archives that included a recipe for mouthwash tentatively dated to some time around 1890

and there, in the second line is the word glass written as glaſs.

Obviously the dating could be wrong and the document could have been written well before 1890, and the person writing it could have learned to write using the long s even though by the time the document was written it was no longer in common usage.

And while I’m prepare to stick to 1830 (±5) for when it dropped out of common usage, there’s evidence that the handwritten long s was still in use in 1842

suggesting that some people were still using the long s in correspondence in the 1840’s, although the author could conceivably have been old enough to have learned to write using the long s.

Likewise in the course of researching this blog post I looked at one of Wilkie Collins’ letters from 1860, and towards the bottom of the letter there is the phrase Miss Halcombe’s Dream which looks to have been written Miſs Halcombe’s Dream

Wilkie Collins was born in 1825, meaning that he would be of an age where one would have expected him to have learned to write without using the long s.

It could of course simply be a slip of the pen, or it could genuinely be a long s. One example does not a usage make.

I think I might have found myself a little problem to worry out …

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An unused Queen Victoria letter card

Posted on November 5, 2025 by dgm

I’ve picked up rather a nice example of an unused UK Queen Victoria letter card – which we can date to somewhere between 1892 when they were first introduced to sometime shortly after 1901 when she died and the existing stock had run down.

Quite like the very formal Victorian warning on the back about how additional postage must be attached if it was being sent to an overseas address …

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Letter cards

Posted on October 21, 2025 by dgm

Over the past year or so I’ve developed a slow burn fascination with late Victorian and Edwardian postcards.

I don’t simply collect them, when I get a new one I try my hand at transcribing the card and trying to trace the addressees.

It sounds voyeuristic, and perhaps it is, but it allows me to practice my family history research skills as well as my ability to read late nineteenth century handwriting.

I’m not a regular collector by any means, only buying four or five a year, but I do spend some time scouring ebay and etsy for interesting looking examples.

And in the process of looking for postcards to transcribe, I occasionally come across items described as letter cards

So what were letter cards?

First issued by the Belgian post office in 1882, they consisted of a sheet of postcard weight card which was prefolded and had a line of adhesive around the edge that gave you an area slightly smaller than a standard sheet of Victorian era writing paper – about one and a half times the size of an A6 page today -on which to write your message. You then sealed the card and posted it.

The recipient then tore round the perforation to open the card and read the message.

The principal advantages of the letter card, as opposed to a post card were that they were private and you could send a longer message. The disadvantage was that they cost as much to send as an ordinary letter.

In Australia, the Victorian Post Office was the first to issue them in 1889, three years before the United Kingdom in 1892.

Letter cards were never terribly popular as they didn’t offer any real advantage over a standard letter, but they clung on as an item of postal stationery until the late seventies, or perhaps early eighties.

One advantage was that if you needed to send a letter and didn’t have stamps, paper and envelopes to hand you could buy a letter card from a post office, write your message and drop them in the mail.

I remember using one myself in the very late seventies during a cycling trip round the Western Isles of Scotland when I missed a ferry due to mechanical trouble and had to write to a friend to reschedule a catch-up on the way back and ask them to buy me a couple of spare inner tubes and a new tyre.

Nowadays it would be a text message or an email.

I’ve come across so few examples on collectors’ websites, that unlike postcards, I’ve no real picture in my mind of how they were used in the early part of the twentieth century.

There’s some evidence that they were used by members of the AIF to send messages home during world war one (and perhaps also world war two), but I havn’t been able as yet to find any definitive record of their use on a regular basis.

Certainly, being made of card they would have been as easy for the military postal service to handle as a field postcard, but would have provided service men a way of sending a private or intimate message, although the military censors might have had something to say about that….

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The Featherstone riots of 1893

Posted on October 4, 2025 by dgm

This past few months I’ve been researching the interconnections between various translators of nineteenth century Russian novels, radical Russian exiles and the birth of the socialist movement in England.

Along the way we’ve had a diversion or two, such as the unlikely story of a pair of English anarchists cycling all the way to Yasnaya Polyana to meet with Tolstoy (spoiler – they didn’t), and possible connections via the utopian side of the English socialist movement and the rather more serious business of RSDLP meeting in exile in 1907.

However, so far I havn’t really investigated a darker side of the growth of the socialist movement in the north of England.

At the end of September in 1893 a group of anarchists (which basically meant socialists and other left leaning people) started having noisy public meetings at Ardwick Green in Manchester, which annoyed the local vicar.

At first the police were conciliatory and offered them an alternative location for their meetings.

The anarchists refused and the meeting was quite violently broken up by the police led by Detective Inspector Caminada who broke his umbrella while whacking one of the anarchists.

The fight was reported in various local newspapers at the time, and while blows were certainly exchanged, it seems no worse, and no more significant than a pub fight on a Saturday night.

Various of the anarchists were arrested, who included Alf Barton, later to become associated with the Independent Labour party and the co-operative movement.

In Caminada’s account of the trial, he mentions that one of the anarchists, as well as being fined, had to pay towards the replacement of Caminada’s umbrella, likened it to the Featherstone miners having to pay for the bullets used against them.

Now I actually know Featherstone. It’s a hard scrabble former mining town in West Yorkshire on the outside of Wakefield that nowadays is principally famous for its rugby league side.

But it has a dark secret.

It’s the last town in England where the army was used to fire on striking miners.

Now you might think that this happened during the pull plug riots of the 1840s, but no, it happened much later, in September 1893.

In 1893 the price of coal collapsed due to cheap imports and an oversupply of domestically mined coal.

The mine owners sought to preserve their profits by cutting wages, reducing hours worked, and sacking miners. Needless to say, this did not play well with the miners.

In Featherstone the miners were blockading one of the pits in the town, and the police were called to disperse them and allow the coal wagons to come and go.

It turned into a fight and barrels of tar and oil were set on fire and stones were thrown at the police, who retaliated by charging the crowd, with little or no effect. The police were under strength as several officers had been transferred to Doncaster to help police the St Leger horse race.

Fearing an attempt to burn down the pit buildings the riot act was read and the army called at the request of the pit owner.

The army were supposed to fire over the heads of the strikers, but instead fired into the crowd.

Two volleys were fired, the first harmless, the second resulting in the deaths of two of the striking miners.

Strangely, the shootings seem to have been little reported at first, and treated more as a minor detail by the London press, although the local press in Yorkshire reported the shootings.

Demonstrations in solidarity with the victims were held all across the Yorkshire coal field and as far way as Glasgow.

Times had changed and the government responded by convening a public enquiry into the shootings to try and defuse things.

The enquiry claimed that all procedures had been followed correctly, including the reading of the Riot Act and the warnings issued to the strikers. The army officer responsible for issuing an order to fire was exonerated as he was only ‘doing his duty’, but in a tacit admission that things should not have turned out that way, the government offered compensation to the families of the victims.

It’s worth remembering that while women had won the right to vote in New Zealand in 1893, in England there was still a property qualification that effectively denied most working men the right to vote – most poorer families rented their houses for six or seven pounds a year and hence did not qualify as either they did not own their own homes or pay more than ten pounds a year in rent, and as for women, a limited right to vote was thirty years in the future.

This means that the miners really did not have anyone other than the trade unions to support them and that the whole system was weighted against them.

The enquiry seems to have been enough to calm matters, especially as the coal strike was settled in the mean time and the miners had gone back to work.

It wasn’t quite the end of it though, the miners of Featherstone came out on strike again in January 1894 on being denied a day’s holiday on New Year’s Day.

This time the mine owners caved in and settled the dispute in the miners’ favour.

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Tea and the English Class System

Posted on September 16, 2025 by dgm

Three Victorian Ladies drinking tea – public domain

Recently, I’ve been reading Sam Llewellyn’s Shadow in the Sands (ignore Amazon’s silly pricing – second hand copies are available for a few dollars).

The novel is positioned as a sequel to Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands – one of my favourite books – and for that reason I would normally avoid Llewellyn’s book for fear of spoiling my affection for Childers’ book, but this would be a mistake.

The book’s well written, and while it cleverly links to Childers’ book with some characters in common it can be read as a stand alone novel if you are so inclined.

It’s also very good on its portrayal of the class divides of English society at the end of the long nineteenth century.

And this leads us to tea drinking.

There’s a scene in which Dacre – upper class officer type, and nasty with it – when served a mug of tea asks ‘Don’t you have any china?’ to which the reply comes ‘It is sir, didn’t I boil it enough?’

And this neatly encapsulates the class divide around tea in nineteenth century Britain.

I hadn’t really thought about this before, but the middle and upper classes preferred quality tea, Ceylon or Assam, which was drunk black or with lemon to let them concentrate on the flavour of the tea. (Strangely, when I was in Sri Lanka, ten or more years ago, I had a dickens of a job persuading waiters in cafes that I wanted a weaker black tea without milk, and even then it was still pretty strong.)

Tea was expensive, and so when working class people bought tea, to be drunk as an alternative to beer with a meal, they bought the cheapest black tea going and steeped it in hot water as long as possible to get a strong black brew to which they added milk and sugar – a bit like what we call ‘Builder’s Tea’ today.

And so, how you liked your tea said something about your social class.

Of course, it’s not a universal rule, my father, despite coming from a family of tenant farmers, but who had lived in India and Malaysia, preferred his tea black, or with a slice of lemon, while my mother preferred hers with milk and sugar.

(Personally, I prefer my tea weak and black – English Breakfast in the morning, Russian Caravan in the afternoon, while J will only drink lemon scented or Earl Grey, again weak and black. I’m not sure what that says about us…)

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The Panjdeh crisis and Australia

Posted on September 14, 2025 by dgm

As I’ve written before there was a major panic in 1885 that, on the back of the Panjdeh incident, there might be war between Britain and Russia, including the chance of an attack on the east coast of Australia by the Russian pacific fleet.

To add to the general feeling of unsettlement, there were fears about the impact of the German colonisation of New Guinea, fears that led Queensland in 1883 to attempt to colonise Papua as a bulwark against further German expansion on behalf of the British Empire, only to be roundly told off by the government in London that colonies could not establish colonies, and more interestingly, that colonisation might be met with some resistance by the indigenous population. [UK Hansard April 1883 :: Courier Brisbane June 1883]

However, by the middle of the year the panic had largely subsided, although in June a visitor to Cooktown was mistaken as a Russian spy, and detained before being released by the local magistrate.

After then seems to have ceased to panic about spies and invasion and returned to more prosaic concerns such as the sale of under strength rum…

Riverine Herald Echuca November 1885

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Iron 2 heller

Posted on September 7, 2025 by dgm

A few weeks ago I wrote about how both Imperial Germany and Austria Hungary replaced their small change during world war one with coins made of base metals such as iron as the as the metal from the original coins was needed for the war effort.

At the time I only had examples from Germany and the Hungarian half of the AustriaHungary.

Since then I’ve acquired this example of a 2 Heller Austrian coin

Note the complete lack of any inscription other than the value and the date.

Unlike the Hungarian part of the empire, in the German speaking part of the empire there was a recognition that not everyone spoke German, and hence the low value coins simply carried the imperial eagle on one side and the value and date of issue on the reverse.

Higher value coins such as 1krone coins usually carried the value on the reverse and the emperor’s image and titles (in Latin in the German half of the empire, after all no one spoke Latin, and in Hungarian in Hungarian portion of the empire).

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Cooktown and the Panjdeh crisis of 1885

Posted on September 7, 2025 by dgm

Over on one of my other blogs I mention that there seems to be some confusion over the provenance of the Cooktown gun.

The myth is that in 1885 the town council was worried about a Russian invasion an requested help to defend the town, and were sent a single old and useless Napoleonic wars cannon

I havn’t got to the end of the story, but it’s true that in 1885 there was a major panic in Australia about the possibility of war with Russia over a border incident between Russia and the nominally independent emirate of Afghanistan – I say nominally independent, as while after various disastrous wars in Afghanistan throughout the nineteenth century, Britain had largely left Afghanistan to the Afghans, except for foreign policy, especially where Imperial Russia was concerned.

The British were worried, seriously worried, that as part of the Great Game Russia may somehow absorb Afghanistan as it had absorbed various other central Asian emirates, and that they would have Imperial Russia on the borders British India.

British India was key to the finances of the British Empire – without it the Empire was unsustainable, especially as the Australian colonies, New Zealand and Canada were self governing and did not contribute to the overall running of the Empire.

After the departure of British forces in the 1870s the Australian colonies largely looked after their own defence.

Some, such as gold rich Victoria took matters seriously and invested in defence with coastal defence batteries as at Port Fairy and a small coastal defence fleet. Others did less, and others such as Queensland were sort of in the middle with some coastal defence ships and a militia of sorts.

And then came 1885.

Imperial Germany was in the process of occupying what is now the northern half of PNG, and German warships were prowling off the coast of northern Australia, and somewhere, out in the Pacific was the Russian Empire’s pacific fleet.

Australia suddenly seemed very alone.

There was something not far short of panic, something reflected in the newspapers of the time.

And Cooktown, despite being an important steamship port and telegraph station was suddenly uncomfortably close to both the German forces in New Guinea and the Russian fleet, and a long way from the nearest help.

Not surprisingly there was a degree of panic with the town council asking if the government in Brisbane would pay to evecuate the (white) women and children, presumably while the men stayed to defend the town and hinterland from the tsar’s forces.

And this is where I suspect the myth of Cooktown being sent a Napoleonic war cannon to defend itself against the Russian fleet comes from.

I’ve no doubt the cannon was gifted by Queen Victoria, perhaps in connection with her 1887 Jubilee, and that this has somehow become mixed up with the military preparations in the event of a Russian invasion, and like all stories has grown in the telling….

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Another first world war propaganda postcard

Posted on August 15, 2025 by dgm

A nice example of a British propaganda card entitled ‘One of our tanks’ showing a British Mark IV tank

The text is quite legible and written in ink

My transcription of the text reads

Addressed to

Mrs Jas Souter
Tassetshill
Auchmacoy
Ellon

Posted

Aberdeen, 12.30PM Feb 5 1918 with standard George V 1/2d stamp

Message

This is the chap to swallow the notes! Hope you are all well, as we are here. How's Willie, he'll make a fine ploughman now. Tell him I was asking for him. From your loving nephew Mac.

Reverse illustration shows British Mark IV tank and caption
'copyright ELP Co - one of our tanks -passed by censor'

Auchmacoy still exists and is a farming estate outside of Ellon in Aberdeenshire. My first guess was that Tassetshill is a house or cottage name, or possibly a now disappeared fermtoun.

Google Maps only finds Auchmacoy, but the Royal Mail postcode finder admits to the existence of a South Tassetshill. The 1903 Ordnance Survey map shows Auchmacoy as a walled estate.

Tassethill lies a kilometre of two to the north east of Auchmacoy and, just to confuse things, is spelled Tassathill on the 1903 ordnance survey map and consists of a small settlement, probably a fermtoun (ie a group of farmworkers cottages clustered around a farmhouse and byres) to the north of Auchmacoy

Looking at a larger scale survey map from roughly the same period, this is confirmed with there being two fermtouns, north and south Tassatshill.

But the Royal Mail address finder only lists South Tassetshill. The 1965 Ordnance survey map still shows two groupings of buildings at Tassathill

My guess is that at some time in the last sixty or so years North Tassatshill was abandoned.

Scotlands people is not much help in identifying the addressee, there is no James Soutar (or his wife) listed in either the 1911 or 1921 census. This is not surprising as the land tenure system in the North East of Scotland meant that people would often move from job to job, rather than settling in one place.

The mention of Willie making a fine ploughman suggests that the Soutars were skilled agricultural workers, with a ploughman being a skilled occupation requiring the ploughman to be able to handle a team of heavy horses and plough a straight furrow – there even used to be annual ploughing championships where ploughmen competed for prize cups, and perhaps a small amount of cash.

As agricultural workers the Soutars would probably been exempt from conscription, as my grandfather, a tenant farmer further down the coast at St Cyrus was…

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